Studio artists Anna Macleod and Joe Hanly have attempted to be more ambitious than most in their use of this gallery with their exhibition/installation And, and while not exactly rebuilding the space from scratch, they attempt to, make its idiosyncrasies one of the subjects of their work.
Instead of using the gallery as in the traditional manner, the pair rcconfigure the space, leaping out into the middle of the floor, filling the shop windows, building a bogus column and even inventing a new curved wall space that echoes the studios' interior oval stairwell.
On the side of ambition, then, Macleod and Hanly are pointing in a promising direction. The combination of the two artists' work, however, remains prickly. Joe Hanly's exploded paint sculptures gather up large chunks of wood and stone and make them behave as though they were as weightless as polystyrene, revealing a familiar gameplan in which the weighty implications of objects, particularly art objects, become hilariously detached from their physical form.
Macleod's parts of the installation work in an almost opposite manner, their weightlessness, their frailty almost precluding them from saying anything at all. Macleod's work includes the phoney column that turns out to be housing for some slide projectors, and the chain mail window hangings which also feature slides. Easily her most engaging piece, however, is the curved wall, which she has covered with chicken wish-bones to create a warped, Opish grid of possibilities.
Together, Macleod and Hanly's work certainly appears assertively heterogeneous, but not always productively so. The shape of it all is almost too variable to sustain the idea of a single installation, and what appears is two small groups of works attempting to make the obvious seem a little less dependable.